Plastic labels are enjoying increasing use for labeling beverage and other bottles. Many of these labels are of a wrap-around type, each of which is adhesively secured to its bottle. Plastic labels in the form of tubular sleeves, each of which is slid over the bottle are being used in increasing quantities.
Until recently, the major advantage of wrap-around labels has been their low-cost achieved by high-speed labeling machines that have had greater throughput than sleeving machines. With the advent of the machine of the Labeler Patent, wrap-around labels no longer enjoy economic advantage over tubular sleeves. Indeed, given that the glue accounts for approximately eight percent of their cost, wrap-around labels are now more expensive. This is especially true if one takes into account the fact that, if there is a labeling malfunction with a glue-on label, both bottle and label are typically thrown away while, with the sleeve labels, the label is removed and another label is applied to the bottle.
A major advantage of tubular sleeve labels is that they can be removed from bottles to enable total recycling of both the bottle and the label. Wrap-around labels, on the other hand, make it impractical to fully recycle such things as a labeled plastic bottle because the label cannot be economically separated from the bottle, and the label and bottle are typically made of different materials, namely polyethylene for labels and P.E.T. for the bottles.
The Case Desleever Patent discloses and claims a system for removing labels from bottles as a set of bottles are transferred from a case to, for example, a washer for processing bottles for re-use. While the machine of the Case Delabeler Patent is quite satisfactory for its purpose, there has remained a need for a high-speed effective automatic delabeler for removing labels from used bottles in a bottling plant where they are to be refilled and relabeled as by the machine of the Labeler Patent. The need is especially apparent where the bottles to be delabeled are fluted or otherwise specially configured. This need is increasing because the re-use of bottles of both and glass and plastic is increasing at significant rates.